Zed Head

It's out there now. https://www.autoevolution.com/news/barn-find-1976-datsun-280z-gets-washed-for-the-first-time-in-44-years-150616.html

Sounds a lot like loose crud clogging the inlet line screen in the fuel tank. The crud gets sucked on to the screen and clogs it then floats free when the engine dies. You might drain the tank and see what you find.

Good luck and be careful with it. Read the recent thread about the 31K 240Z, that's what my joke about value was about. If you want top dollar, you have to do what the collectors want, not what you think they should want. They're a finicky bunch. Everything that you do to it becomes part of its provenance. Keep every scrap of paper that came with the car, even the brown wrapping paper. Every part imprint on a piece of paper is like the Shroud of Turin.

Oops. Just kidding... I really don't know if being part of an AMMO cleaning products video is good for the resale. The high end collectors want a nice story behind the car. Don't know much about AMMO. Maybe they're the stuff. Good luck to him. https://www.ammonyc.com/

That's a $400,000 car. I watched the video up to the first ad. Too bad it got the undercoating treatment. Edit - wait, I just watched more video. They used the car as an advertisement for cleaning products. It's a $5,000 car now. Shame. Seriously, I bet they knocked $30,000 off of that car's potential price, if the goal was to sell it.

I found that spinning the pin in the bore loosened things up quite a bit. I used a lug nut on the end of the pin and squirted lube in the lock pin hole and the the ends, then just spun it for a while. If I was doing another I'd probably rig something up to spin and pull at the same time. Moving the spindle pin back and forth in the bore also helps, probably distributes the rust away from the pinch points. I also got caught by the pin being rusted in to the sleeve inside the rubber bushing. I found the the rubber would pull the pin back after I pounded it in. It was confusing for a while. "I know I saw it move but there it is where it started" WTF!".

Oh Canada. Did you put some desiccant in there with it? And mousetraps? Don't want to find fungi-covered mice when you unpack it in ten months.

Adding to zKars just-now post - That makes sense jonbill. But still doesn't really tell if there should be one or two for a specific distributor. Looks like one has a steeper advance rate than the other. 7 degrees in 500 RPM versus 5. Distributor degrees, 14 versus 10 in crankshaft. Maybe that's one spring versus two.

The picture shows an A and a B spring though. Always somethin'. The test would be how much unhindered rotation of the shaft is there with just one spring. The springs are there to balance the shaft rotation due to the weights moving. No spring should mean that one weight is just flopping around. Maybe the short slot weight doesn't move at all. The words imply that it doesn't move, maybe, "it does not leave clearance either at start or end"., but then why they do they show a spring? Confusing.

I don't know what all this means but... One says spring, one says set. And the 72 FSM shows the unbalanced slots. I alternated pictures and links, hope it makes it through. http://www.carpartsmanual.com/datsun/Z-1969-1978/electrical/distributor/240z/for-manual/to-aug-71/6 http://www.carpartsmanual.com/datsun/Z-1969-1978/electrical/distributor/240z/for-manual/from-sep-71/5

If I ever find a 240Z in a barn I'm going to just have the dirt it's sitting on carved out and placed on a trailer with the car on top and whatever happens to be on the car itself. Cleanup will be whatever hay/dust/dirt/droppings are blown off on the way to its new home prior to taking 300 pictures and posting on BAT.

I noticed that too. Here's the Green Monster, 21,000 miles. You can see the blue paint that Blue246 was talking about also. Dogpile!!

Just had another horrible noise episode, definitely from this site. I saw AK260"s comment and went to the beginning of the 31K Z thread and started re-reading. I clicked open Page 2 and about ten seconds later "too important to miss, tonight at 6..." blasted through the speakers. I should have muted and tried to figure out which ad was causing it, the little one that sits on top of everything at the bottom of the page so you can't read the words below, or the big one at the top of the page. Instead I just closed the tab and the noise stopped. So @Mike you said that you would never have autoplay ads on the site but somehow they have slipped through. Those marketing guys are persistent and clever. Probably better at internet stuff than the Russians. I'll try to figure out which visuals match the words if/when it happens again. I wonder if it's possible to have autoplay audio with no visual associated.

I think I found the key to verifying low miles. "Original cosmoline". 7:00. It actually is pretty impressive that they found some. I tried to work at a place that details cars when they came off the ships, before they go to the dealerships, and that stuff is everywhere. I didn't last, you have to be a human squirrel to do high speed car detailing.

Different colors probably go on at different thicknesses due to their ability to cover. The Green Monster video was pretty good but that guy kind of just walked around and took a bunch of measurements but didn't say much about why some cars had different thicknesses, besides assuming that a repaint would be thicker than original paint. He assumes that a second paint job is always thicker, like a painter doesn't strip and sand areas to make them smooth, before painting. It would be better to have 20 or so specific locations to measure at, and measurements at those points from a whole set of cars, as a database. The old beat-up $5000 Z's probably have plenty of untouched paint to measure. That would mean more, I think, than these random measurements. Good idea, questionable execution.

Quality and/or calibration? Method? Training? https://www.measurementshop.co.uk/blog/guides/all-you-need-to-know-about-thickness-gauges Or the red car has a second coat of paint? We need microscopy on a paint chip cross section.

What's funny is that in the 70's I think that they still had a guy with a spray gun painting parts as they came down the assembly line. I think they even masked off and repainted parts if there was a ding from a clumsy assembler. Probably tons of variation in these old cars. Today it's all robotics and dip tanks. Paint thickness readings seem like a strange new criterion for originality. What if they measure a rust spot before it bubbles?

Use a meter and measure voltage at the battery terminals while it's running. The dying could be a separate problem.

One of these articles might help. https://www.classiczcars.com/articles/body-paint/

The Flukes have a $15 fuse inside to teach you to pay attention to your leads and settings. You get about 8 fries to breakeven point.

This one ended like they thought the other one would. But the end result is the same. People have high opinions on the value of their 240Z's.

Six minutes! A different 1970 240Z! https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1970-datsun-240z-63/?utm_source=dm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2020-10-21

Sounds like what you're asking about is whether you should temporarily brace things before you remove the old body reinforcements, AKA "frame rails". The body is a unibody, or monocoque, chassis, basically just a steel box with strategically placed reinforcement, like the frame rails. If you want to get a better feel for it, just do a Google on unibody or monocoque and you'll find a bunch. There are several "boxed" sections around the body that are important, mostly on the edges, like the rocker panels and the door and windshield openings. The frame rails are kind of secondary to the major boxed sections, like the rocker panels. The Body chapter shows cross sections of all of the boxed areas. I wrote all of that stuff because you used the word frame. There's no frame. Anyway, I've read that removing the floors in order to put new ones in can lead to flexing. The floors are a critical part of the steel box. So just think of it as a steel box and support areas so that the box can't twist. Probably just well-placed jack stands are enough.

I meant diameter. I learned a while ago that the first number is the sidewall width (I thought it was tread width), which is important. But the second is the ratio of width to height. So you need the calculator to know the final dimension. 205's seem to work well as far as rubbing goes, although some brands do rub. I had 205/70-14's and one brand rubbed slightly on hard corners and the other didn't. the car was lowered about an inch. Low profile tires will give a rougher ride. So, it all depends on what you're trying to achieve. Looks, performance, comfort, or a combination. I don't think I've seen anyone talk about a 55 series on their car. Don't forget offset also, that needs to be right or you'll get rubbing. You can also roll or cut the wheelwell edges to get an extra 1/4 inch.